The late Najma Zaheer Baquer and late Ali Baquer (daughter and son in-law of Sajjad and Razia Sajjad Zaheer) carefully kept and protected these materials through the years so they could be opened to the public someday. Without the tremendous generosity and collaborative spirit of Najma Zaheer Baquer and the tenacious drive of Seema Baquer (granddaughter of Sajjad and Razia Zaheer), this project would not have been realized.

Surajit Sarkar of the Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University Delhi helped facilitate work across institutions and inspired archival conversations. Thanks also to Denys Leighton and the CCK student staff at AUD.

Scholars envisioning the use of this material include Dhritabrata Bhattacharya Tato, Kamran Asdar Ali, Syed Akbar Hyder, Surajit Sarkar, Snehal Shingavi, and Bilal Hashmi. Extra thanks to Kamran Ali for his tireless financial and intellectual advocacy and to Akbar Hyder for his linguistic guidance.

Financial support for travel, digitization, and description were provided by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas; special thanks to Kamran Asdar Ali, Rachel Meyer and Rita Omrani. Additional funding for digitization and hosting were provided by the South Asia Materials Project of the Center for Research Libraries; special thanks to Judy Alspach and Maritza Lockhart at CRL.

The staff at Daastaan Media Communications, led by Dhritabrata Bhattacharya Tato, created the original inventory/handlist of the entire archive thereby allowing it to be carefully tracked throughout the entire process.

R. Prakash and G. Sundar of the Roja Muthiah Research Library oversaw digitization of the entire collection, complete with boxing up materials at the family home in Delhi and shipping them to and from Chennai.

Quality control, careful metadata editing–in three languages no less–and linking to individual items for the full inventory was meticulously carried out by Jonathan Seefeldt.

Madeline Goebel was the mastermind behind the Zooniverse image identification project. Mansi Bajaj, Namrata Kanchan, and Nishant Upadhyay translated the Zooniverse project into Hindi and Urdu.

The bibliography was researched by Anuj Kaushal.

Mary Rader created the WordPress site and provided overall project coordination.

Questions, comments, or suggestions can be emailed to: zaheerarchive@utlists.utexas.edu. 

last update: 16 June 2023